Essex Poison

by Ian Sansom

  But this, finally, was enough wild rambling for Mr Willett, who was clearly beginning to despair of ever being able to follow what Morley was going on about and who presumably had work to do.

  ‘All right, you can take the Cadillac,’ he said. ‘Until we get the Lagonda looked at and ready for you. It’ll be Monday at the earliest now.’

  ‘Excellent!’ said Morley, ceasing immediately in his mad automotive oration. ‘Excellent!’ He shook Mr Willett’s hand and gave me, I thought, a quick look of triumph. There was always – sometimes – a method in his madness.

  ‘We have wheels, Sefton!’ he exulted, as we left the showroom in the Cadillac. ‘And what wheels we have!’

  CHAPTER 15

  WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US?

  MIRIAM, NEEDLESS TO SAY, loved the Cadillac and certainly seemed to agree with Morley that it was indeed a kind of mechanical aphrodisiac: she insisted on referring to it, alas, as her ‘Yankee toy’. She spent an inordinate amount of time merrily and pointlessly revving the engine outside the George Hotel, in absolute ecstasy, causing quite a hullaballoo: the roar she managed to coax from the thing was really quite extraordinary, like an animal in heat.

  ‘She was just the same when she got her first pedal car,’ said Morley, who was momentarily distracted with yet more articles to file – a piece on spade mills for some guild newsletter or other, and a short piece on Maimonides for the Jewish Chronicle, all of which he somehow managed to write, edit and dispatch in the time it took me to rustle up a flask of tea and some dry biscuits from the hotel kitchens – but eventually we set off shortly before lunch for the famous oyster beds on the Essex coast.

  While Morley and I had spent the morning sorting out the Lagonda and procuring the Cadillac, Miriam had been busy catching up on all the local news and gossip. This was her forte. She was capable of eliciting information – and, frankly, almost anything else – from anyone. Apparently there had been no other fatalities from the oysters at the Oyster Feast and those who had been admitted to hospital had been released.

  ‘Crowd hysteria,’ said Morley. ‘As I said.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Miriam. ‘It does seem that poor Mr Marden really was just terribly unlucky.’

  ‘Heart attack?’ said Morley. ‘Possibly. Could have been anything.’

  ‘One bad oyster, possibly?’ said Miriam.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Morley. ‘One bad oyster, out of however many thousand being eaten at the feast, and poor Marden’s on the receiving end? Statistically highly unlikely.’

  ‘Well, whatever it was, it was jolly bad luck anyway,’ said Miriam, as if Marden had just been dealt a bad hand in a game of whist.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Morley, though of course he did not believe in luck, good or bad, in cards or in anything else. (For full details of his ideas about luck see his much reprinted article ‘Get Lucky’, which first appeared in the London Gazette on 24 October 1931, and which has been variously plagiarised, summarised, rephrased, represented and otherwise regurgitated by many others and indeed by Morley himself ever since. In summary: according to Morley, good luck is a skill, and bad luck simply the product of poor choices and overlooked opportunities. In other words, tough luck. He always had a touch of the Samuel Smiles about him.) Fortunately he did not seem to be in the mood for a discussion about the meaning of the mayor’s good or bad luck. The poor man was dead, after all, and that was that. And we had work to do. ‘Come on!’ he said, as we finally left Colchester. ‘Essex won’t write itself, you know.’

  As we left Colchester in the Cadillac I glanced up, half expecting to hear the overhead chugging of Amy Johnson in her Gypsy Moth, waving us goodbye. But there was nothing. She’d gone. I patted her silver cigarette case in my suit pocket.

  At high noon the vast salt marshes and intertidal mudflats of the Essex coast have the most strange and spectral appearance – almost as if one were in a desert approaching an oasis. It is a landscape without figures which forever promises mystery, misery and – most likely – fog. Distant creeks coil around dozens of uninhabited low-lying islands covered with lilac sea lavender and both land and water seem never-ending. Morley of course was absolutely in his element, imagining the place as it might once have been, when England and France were joined by land and mammoths roamed the marshes. He insisted that I make notes on all sorts of passing items of interest: the occasional cabin and poor dwelling, the wildlife, rose hips, samphire, faint evidence of ancient settlements. Starlings. Swallows. The white corona of the sun, which looked vaguely dyed yellow, apparently, and which reminded him of the colour of one of his favourite canaries … The conversation was as strange and as spangly as ever, Morley merrily riffing, for example, on the theme of Roman Colchester.

  ‘Do you know, for all their achievements, what we really have to thank the Romans for, Sefton?’ he asked, as we sped along.

  ‘Aqueducts?’ said Miriam, who was not one to be bested, even on very general questions of general knowledge.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Morley. ‘Not aqueducts, Miriam, absolutely not. Common misapprehension. We have the Greeks and Assyrians to thank for the development of aqueducts, I think you’ll find.’

  ‘Sanitation?’ I said.

  ‘Ancient India!’ said Morley. ‘Plenty of it there, thank you very much. Highly sanitised race, the Indians. Years ahead. We have the Harappans to thank for the development of public health and sanitation, Sefton, not the Romans. Are you quite up to date on your ancient cultures and civilisations? Does a Cambridge education not equip a man with such knowledge?’

  Apparently not. My grasp of ancient cultures and civilisations was clearly not what it might have been. The Harappans? Who on earth were the Harappans?

  ‘The roads, Father?’ said Miriam. ‘Didn’t the Romans give us roads?’

  ‘Hmm, close, my dear, yes, close, roads. Straight strong stone roads certainly. But what about the ancient log roads of Europe, eh? And animal tracks and trails? I fancy the history of the road began long before the Romans, long long ago in Ancient Egypt. And India. And China of course.’

  ‘Irrigation, then?’ said Miriam, with some annoyance. ‘Medicine? Education? Wine? Public order? All or any of the above?’

  ‘Mesopotamia, China, China, China again, and – guess what? – China. Remarkable culture really, isn’t it?’ said Morley. ‘I wonder if there might be a book in it, you know? What the Chinese Did For Us?’

  ‘We have more than enough books on our hands at the moment, Father,’ said Miriam. ‘Don’t forget there’s that book of folktales you’re supposed to be editing. And that history of tartan.’ It was down to Miriam to manage Morley’s massive output – a management task that was in itself far beyond most human capacities, never mind Morley’s actual endless production of the stuff, which was unimaginable.

  ‘Ah, yes, the tartan book; I wonder if I can get something in about the Dagenham Girl Pipers?’ said Morley.

  ‘I’m sure you can, Father. I’m sure you can. But we must focus first on the task in hand, mustn’t we?’

  ‘Of course, my dear. What were we talking about?’

  ‘China?’ I said. Miriam shot me a glance of disapproval.

  ‘Yes! Yes,’ said Morley, returning to his theme. ‘We underestimate the Chinese at our peril, Sefton. In years to come, mark my words, China will once again be the world’s greatest empire. The Soviet Union will seem quite puny in comparison. Never mind the Roman. So …’ He looked up from his notebook for a moment. He was always making notes: writing, drawing, making calculations. There are indeed many many more notebooks than there are books – a treasure trove for future scholars. (And for future reference, as I’ve often had to plead: please do not write to me, write to the estate, c/o Morley’s London agent.) ‘Do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘Tell us what, Father?’ said Miriam.

  ‘What was the most important thing that the Romans ever did for us?’

  ‘Oh yes, do,’ said Miriam. ‘Because I think I can saf
ely say that we’re totally fed up with this game now, aren’t we, Sefton?’

  ‘Well …’ I said, havering. I probably spent half of my working life with Morley totally fed up and the other half amazed. It was a reasonable percentage.

  ‘You really want to know the most important thing that the Romans ever did for us?’ said Morley.

  ‘Yes!’ said Miriam. ‘Do get on with it, Father.’

  ‘The most important thing that the Romans did for us was …’ Morley paused for effect. ‘The cultivation of oysters in brackish pools near their centres of settlement, of course!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miriam. ‘How disappointing.’

  We arrived eventually in West Mersea, which is a place that specialises in the cultivation of oysters in brackish pools, and which is indeed rather disappointing, the kind of place that it’s hard to believe still exists in modern England. One doubts it could exist for much longer, if it still exists at all, that is. It had all the appearance of a remote fishing village in the Highlands of Scotland or in Nova Scotia. Beyond the few houses and the chapels, the church, there were dozens of rather decrepit buildings clustered down by the beach that at first appearance seemed to be made entirely of salvaged materials – weatherbeaten planks, rusted iron and so on – and which on closer inspection turned out actually to be made entirely of salvaged materials. The place had all the aspect of a coastal slum.

  Some oyster shells

  ‘Marvellous!’ said Morley, as we clambered out of the Cadillac, having parked in a muddy patch of ground by the largest of the buildings. ‘Look at this! Human ingenuity in the face of nature’s onslaught!’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Miriam, pulling off her driving gloves and lighting a cigarette. ‘Not what I expected at all. Absolutely dismal, isn’t it?’ It was always impossible to know exactly what Miriam expected, though she always expected better, and dressed accordingly. Today she had gone for a nautical look, a silk dress in blue and white with a high belted waist, capped sleeves and bow collar, accessorised – as she liked to say – with a sailor’s cap and white patent leather heels. Miriam and her outfit would probably have looked perfectly the part in a cool breeze on a yacht on a summer’s day in the south of France. They were perhaps a little de trop in West Mersea in October.

  ‘Cut on the bias,’ she confided to me, when she caught me admiring her in the dress, though I had absolutely no idea what that meant. ‘Rather flattering, isn’t it?’ I couldn’t deny it.

  Morley knelt down and took two handfuls of what appeared to be muddy gravel.

  ‘As I thought!’ he said, straightening up. ‘Look at this, Sefton.’

  I looked. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Muddy gravel?’

  ‘Crushed and ground oyster shells!’ he exclaimed. ‘Marvellous! Used to be used as aggregate, of course, by the Romans. Very useful building material. Only trouble is, the buildings made from it tend to collapse.’ He allowed the oyster shell gravel to run through his fingers. ‘Anyway, lead on, Miriam!’

  ‘Lead on, Macduff!’ I said, in an attempt to ingratiate myself with the pair of them, with a little Shakespearean allusion of my own.

  ‘It’s “Lay on, Macduff,”’ said Miriam.

  ‘Spoken by Macbeth,’ said Morley.

  ‘“And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”’ added Miriam. ‘Meaning, roughly, let’s fight to the death, before of course Macduff kills Macbeth in combat. Entirely appropriate?’

  ‘Good try, though,’ said Morley. ‘Keep at it, Sefton. You’ll get there.’

  I was getting nowhere.

  CHAPTER 16

  FLITRATION & PURTEFICATION

  MIRIAM HAD ARRANGED for us to meet with an oysterman in West Mersea, a man named Vince, Vincent Ramsey, who had agreed to take us out on his oyster boat, and Vince it was who came lumbering towards us now out of the largest of the buildings, which was by far the most impressive and also almost entirely intact. I noted the sign above the corrugated double doors: COLNE OYSTER FISHERY FILTRATION & PURIFICATION. Except someone had done their best to change the spelling of FILTRATION to FLIRTATION, rubbing out the ‘I’ and inserting another artfully elsewhere. Or unartfully, rather: the word in fact spelt FLITRATION. PURIFICATION had been almost changed to PUTREFACTION: PURTEFICATION. Essex wit or Essex spelling? I couldn’t tell which was which.

  Vince – with his thick white beard and funereal gaze, his old pearl-buttoned waistcoat and flared, patched sailor’s trousers – appeared to be auditioning for the role of a wise and ancient old seadog, a role for which it turned out he was ideally suited. He was a descendant, apparently, of an ancient Essex oyster dredging family and a Freeman of the River Colne, one of the four hundred dredgermen of the Colne Fishery Company who have the right to fish for oysters in and around West Mersea. He imparted this information to Morley in wise and ancient old seadog fashion through his vast salt-speckled seafaring beard while I took a few photographs of the fishing huts and Miriam did her best to pretend that she was in St Tropez.

  ‘You’ve come as a jolly jack tar then?’ said Vince to Miriam.

  ‘One does one’s best, Mr Ramsey,’ said Miriam, with a sour pout. ‘It’s very kind of you to host us. I’m sure the trip will be invaluable for the book.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Vince. ‘You mentioned money?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Miriam, smiling thinly and producing from her handbag a brown envelope that presumably contained crisp unmarked notes. It is true that The County Guides was built largely upon the good-natured generosity of the English people but it also required the steady and continual greasing of palms. Vince took the envelope in silence, counted the money, nodded, and without a word turned to lead us down to his boat, moored off West Mersea’s wobbly jetty. I wondered how much Miriam had handed over. Five? Ten? Twenty pounds? Morley rarely handled cash and seemed oblivious to the back-handers and bribes that made the books possible. Like all good men, like fools and the virtuous, he was incorruptible, though surrounded by corruption.

  ‘I was just saying to my young companions here this morning, the English oyster at its best is absolutely unbeatable, isn’t it, Mr Ramsey?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Vince.

  ‘I had the American oyster once, in New York. Grand Central Station. Have you ever been, Mr Ramsey?’

  ‘No,’ said Vince seadoggedly.

  Morley spoke often of his travels, it seemed to me, not so much to boast or intimidate but simply because he couldn’t imagine people who didn’t live the kind of life he lived. His sympathies were broad, but his understanding strictly limited: for all his socialist convictions he was really an intellectual aristocrat, entirely removed from the dull everyday lives of the English working classes. It seemed pretty clear to me that Vince had probably never ventured much further than Colchester, and that even then that might prove something of a culture shock. Morley carried on, of course, regarding Vince in every way as his intellectual and social equal, regaling the poor man with his autodidactic oyster-lore.

  ‘Crassostrea gigas. Creamier, milder sort of flavour than the English oyster. Not at all unpleasant. Merely bland. Also had a carpetbagger steak in New Orleans. Have you ever tried one?’

  Again, Vince answered no.

  ‘Well, can’t recommend it. Like eating a soft pillow made of meat and brine. What is it Pliny says?’

  ‘Yes, we know, Mr Morley,’ I said, in the hope that this might put paid to another rather one-sided conversation.

  ‘Nec potest videri satis dictum esse de his, cum palmas mensaurum divitum altribuantur illis. Something like that?’

  ‘Very probably.’

  ‘And Juvenal, of course. Circaeis nata forent, an Lucrinum ad saxum, Rhutupinove edita fundo Ostrea, callebat prime deprendere morsu.’

  ‘In English, Father, if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Miriam. ‘I’m sure Mr Ramsey here would appreciate a translation.’

  ‘Something about oysters, wasn’t it?’ said Vi
nce.

  ‘It was indeed, Mr Ramsey!’ said Morley. ‘It was indeed.’

  ‘We have the Latin here too you know,’ said Vince.

  ‘Oh,’ said Miriam, who like me had perhaps been rather quick to jump to conclusions about Vince. Perhaps he was a brilliant Latin scholar.

  ‘Excellent!’ cried Morley, who was always thrilled to meet a fellow autodidact. ‘You know Latin, Mr Ramsey?’

  ‘I don’t know Latin actually, sir, no. But I know oysters,’ said Vince, his beard billowing in the breeze.

  ‘Take a note, Sefton!’ cried Morley. ‘A wonderful phrase, Mr Ramsey, if I may say so. “I don’t know Latin, but I know oysters!” I hope you don’t mind if we borrow it for our book?’

  ‘What’s this book of yours again?’ asked Vince.

  We had by now reached his boat, which resembled a barge, wide across the middle and steered from a small cabin up front, and which was called the Eileen – ‘After my dear mother,’ explained Vince – though Morley of course insisted on calling it the Syracusia.

  ‘Our book, Mr Ramsey,’ said Morley, as we all clambered aboard the Eileen, ‘is to be a portrait of Essex.’

  ‘Warts and all?’ asked Vince.

  ‘I see no warts, Mr Ramsey,’ said Morley, with his typical – and at times rather paper-thin – insouciance.

  ‘You’re maybe not looking hard enough then, are you?’ said Vince, who started up the motor on the boat, and suddenly we were away. Essex receded.

  Morley stood in the cabin with Vince. I took photographs at the stern, and Miriam fell into conversation with the only crew member to join us on the trip, a man introduced to us, improbably, as Mr Storey, who like Mr Ramsey seemed to have stepped onto the boat fresh from the set of a seafaring saga at Pinewood Studios. This was the age, of course, when men still resembled their work, and Mr Storey was the very model of a modern fisherman: unshaven, broad-shouldered, thick forearms bearing tattoos, cigarette stub behind the ear, and with a cable-knit sweater that might actually have been knit from cables.